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Even if you could afford it, you couldnt go out and buy a quantum computer today because theyre a long way from being commercially available. However, that doesnt mean the machines dont exist they do. It is known that that there are such devices in the laboratories of commercial companies, in university research labs and military installations in various countries including the US and the UK, and the chances are that China, Russia and other countries also have them.

However,despite the intense international race to be the first to develop fully-functioning, full-sized quantum computers, currently, as far as practical applications are concerned, the experimental models are generally too small to outperform traditional electronic super-computers. That said, some have beendeveloped to the point that they can be used to solve some heavy-duty tasks, such as integer factorisation.

In essence, integer factorisation this is the decomposition of a composite number, which is a number can be made by multiplying other whole numbers. For example, 6 can be made from 2 x 3 and 15 can be made from 1, 3, 5 and 15, and thus is a composite number. When composite numbers become very large, no workable non-quantum integer factorisation algorithm has yet been found (although one might actually exist). The field of research is important because many cryptographic algorithms are based on the extreme difficulty of factorising large composite integers, and this has direct relevance and security of RSA public key encryption and the RSA digital signature.

Three years ago, a team of French researchers factored a 240-digit number that took 900 core-years of computing power to achieve, and from that experiment estimated that the factorisation of 1024-bit RSA modulus would take 500 times as long in other words, 450,000 core years of computing. However, quantum computers can perform such calculations very quickly. A quantum computer utilising superposition, interference, and entanglement could crack and render instantly obsolete the ubiquitous RSA encryption algorithm in a matter of seconds. Soon, keeping information secret will become many orders of magnitude more difficult.

The qubit is the fundamental data processing element of a quantum computer and researchers are building machines with more and more of them whilst simultaneously developing error-correction methodologies that will enable the performance of longer and longer calculations. Its only a matter of time before all current encryption techniques will be rendered null and void. The general consensus within the industry is that this will happen by 2030 at the latest.

Originally posted here:
Current encryption and security will be null and void by 2030 at the latest - TelecomTV